Hardly less pathetic is the description of the grim Commander, her father, striving vainly to comfort the maid with “proverbs gathered from afar,” until at last
... the voice sententious faltered, and the wisdom it would teach
Lost itself in fondest trifles of his soft Castilian speech;
And on “Concha,” “Conchitita,” and “Conchita,” he would dwell
With the fond reiteration which the Spaniard knows so well.
So with proverbs and caresses, half in faith and half in doubt,
Every day some hope was kindled, flickered, faded, and went out.
Few, indeed, are the poets who have surpassed the tender simplicity and pathos of these lines; and yet there is nothing very original about them either in form or substance. But there are several poems by Bret Harte, perhaps half a dozen, which do bear the mark of original genius, and which, from the perfection of their form, seem destined to last forever.
The Heathen Chinee, little as Bret Harte himself thought of it, is certainly one of these. This poem, says Mr. James Douglas, “is merely an anecdote, an American anecdote, not more deeply humorous than a hundred other American anecdotes. But it is cast in an imperishable mould of style.... Mr. Swinburne’s noble rhythm sang itself into his soul, and he gave it forth again in an incongruously comic theme. The rhythm of a melancholy dirge became the rhythm of duplicity in the garb of innocence. The sadness and the sighing of Meleagar became the bland iniquity of Ah Sin, and the indignantly injured depravity of Bill Nye. It was a miracle of humorous counterpoint, a marvel of incongruously associated ideas.”
Too much, however, can easily be made of the part played by the metre of the Heathen Chinee. Artemis in Sierra is as good in its way as the Heathen Chinee, and the very different metre employed in that poem is made equally effective as the vehicle of irony and burlesque.
Mr. Douglas goes on to say that the Atalanta metre failed in the poem called Dow’s Flat, “because there was no exquisite discord between the sound and the sense, between the rhyme and the reason.”
But did it fail? Let these two specimen stanzas answer:—
For a blow of his pick
Sorter caved in the side,
And he looked and turned sick,
Then he trembled and cried.
For you see the dern cuss had struck—“Water?”—Beg your parding, young man,—there you lied!
It was gold,—in the quartz,
And it ran all alike;
And I reckon five oughts
Was the worth of that strike;
And that house with the coopilow’s his’n,—which the same isn’t bad for a Pike.
Almost all of Bret Harte’s dialect poems have this same perfection of form, and in the whole range of literature it would be difficult to find any verses which tell so much in so small a compass. The poems are short, the lines are usually short, the words are short; but with the few strokes thus available, the poet paints a picture as complete as it is vivid. The thing is so simple that it seems easy, and yet where shall we find its counterpart?
These poems not only please for the moment, but they are read with pleasure over and over again, and year after year. Perhaps their most striking quality is their dramatic quality. They tell a story, and often depict a person. Truthful James, for example, is known to us only as the narrator of a few startling tales; and yet even by his manner of telling them he gives us a fair notion of his own character. The opening lines of The Spelling Bee at Angels are an example:—